


The Wound The Heart Conceals

by pipistrelle



Series: the wonder that's keeping the stars apart [4]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s06e18 Milagro, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, The hurt/comfort that episode demanded but did not supply, like a lot of hurt/comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-05 01:09:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17315222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: An episode tag for S6E18, "Milagro".





	The Wound The Heart Conceals

**Author's Note:**

> Part of a New Year's initiative to clean out all my old drafts and post anything that's finished or near-finished. Because there's never enough workaday h/c fic in the world.

Scully's nails raked his back, his shoulder as she clung to him, heaving harsh, terrified sobs into his chest. Mulder could feel a sticky warmth seeping down to his skin where their bodies pressed together -- blood, from her skin and her shirt. Her blood.

"Scully," he rasped into her hair. "Scully, are you hurt?"

She was crying too hard to speak. He wanted nothing more than to hold her until she felt strong again, but he couldn't focus on calming her down while she might be bleeding to death in his arms. Mulder gently lifted her off the floor and supported her with one arm around her waist. He carefully pried her arms loose from around his neck so he could look at her. Her skin and shirt were smeared with blood from chin to stomach, but it wasn't spreading, and he couldn't see any rips or tears where a knife or bullet might have pierced her skin.

Scully was watching his face, still fighting back sobs, her breathing ragged and painful. Mulder glanced into her eyes, asking permission, and waited for her nod before he carefully undid the top buttons of her shirt with one hand, the other still keeping her upright. He had to see; he had to be sure.

Her skin was whole, smeared with blood but free of any cuts or incisions, free of so much as a bruise. "God, Scully," he breathed, pressing his palm lightly over her sternum, just below the hollow of her neck where her cross hung on its delicate chain. He could feel her heart beating, strong and steadfast as always, and he almost started crying, too. "It looks okay. It looks fine. Does it hurt?"

She shook her head. Mulder pulled her shirt closed and she wrapped her arms around herself, keeping herself together. Tears still streamed down her face, but she had stopped making that horrible gasping sound. Instead she was shivering, so hard that her teeth chattered. "Mulder, I'm c-cold."

"There's a high incidence of shock with psychic surgery," Mulder heard himself saying, almost conversationally, as he wrapped his hands around her upper arms and half-lifted, half-guided her to her feet. "The body finds itself wounded without any actual wound, its protective mechanisms can get thrown out of whack. I'll give you the literature, there's some interesting stuff in there about cytokine storms that was all Greek to me, but you might be able to make something of it." He just wanted to keep talking, keep her with him, keep those clear blue eyes focused on his face and not staring into emptiness. Still holding her close with one arm, he reached out blindly for the nearest soft thing and grabbed his coat from its hook on the back of the door. He tossed it around her shoulders like a blanket and gently manhandled her over to the couch, where he got her to sit and added the Navajo blanket to his coat over her shoulders. Only then did he remember Padgett, down in the basement -- or, more likely, on the run from the ruins his accomplice, or his creation, had left behind.

He wouldn't get far. Mulder would make sure of that.

"Just -- stay there, Scully. Rest," he said, trying not to sound helpless, and retreated into the kitchen to call the Bureau, police, and paramedics. They had been waiting for his call if he and Scully caught anything on their surveillance of Padgett; he hadn't even hung up before he heard the sirens screaming down the block. They would take care of combing the basement for clues, setting up roadblocks, dredging the scum of the city until they turned up Padgett and whatever his sick, rotted imagination had conjured up.

He realized he was clutching his phone nearly hard enough to crack the plastic casing and took a few deep breaths, consciously relaxing the muscles of his arms and shoulders. The murderous rage that had first ignited in the pit of his stomach when he'd opened Padgett's manifesto and found it to be about Scully had finally begun to die down. Scully was here, alive and safe, and she needed him here, too. Not working himself into knots wanting vengeance for the way her self and privacy had been violated.

One thing at a time. Scully came first. He tucked his phone back into his pocket and ran a washcloth in warm water, then went back into the living room. Scully was sitting in the shock position, her head on her knees, taking long, shaky breaths. She was still shivering, but not quite so violently. "Hey," Mulder said softly, kneeling next to the couch. She looked up at him, and he gently dabbed at her neck and chin with the washcloth, wiping away the worst of the blood.

"Thank you," she said, more evenly than he would have expected. She reached out a trembling hand and took the cloth from him.

He let it go, squeezing her shoulder as he stood. "I'll get you something to change into."

By the time he came back with a clean basketball t-shirt and his warmest Oxford sweatshirt, Scully had cleaned all traces of red from her skin. She took the clothes from him with a grateful sigh and peeled off her ruined blouse, tugging the t-shirt over her head in one smooth motion. It fell nearly to her knees; the sweatshirt, when she put it on, looked like she'd tried to wrap herself in a worn gray circus tent.

He couldn't help laughing as he helped her roll the sleeves up high enough to free her hands. "That's a good look on you, Scully."

She smiled faintly in return, which Mulder counted as a major victory. He rubbed his hands up and down her arms as another chill ran through her, and nudged her back towards the couch. "Relax, Scully. The paramedics should be here any minute."

"I'm fine, Mulder," she said in something close to her normal voice, but she sat and pulled her knees up to her chest, still cold. Mulder tucked the blanket back around her and sat down next to her. There were probably other things he should be doing for her, practical things -- what did Scully do to him when he'd gone through a shock? She liked to shine her flashlight in his eyes, that was one, and she liked to poke at his head, but he wasn't always sure that wasn't an excuse to play with his hair. The first-aid course they all took at the bureau didn't really cover the aftermath of botched psychic surgery. There was something in his memory about shock, something about elevating your feet above your head, but he had come to rely on Scully for that kind of thing. And he was sure if it was really necessary, she'd already be doing it.

So with nothing else he could think to do, he sat next to her and wrapped an arm around her, pulling the whole Scully-and-blanket pile close to his chest. "Talk to me, Scully," he said into the hood of his sweatshirt, which she'd pulled up over her hair. ('Titian', Padgett had called it. Rage boiled over in him again and he slammed a lid down on it. Scully came first.)

"What happened to him?" she asked.

"Padgett? I caught him down at the incinerator, getting ready to burn all his precious work. To hide the evidence. I came back up here when I heard your gun, but even if he ran he won't get far. Local PD are ready to grab him the second he shows his face."

"I emptied my clip," Scully said in a flat, toneless voice that he didn't like at all. "The bullets went right through him, Mulder."

Mulder glanced over her head, up at the corner above the front door, where he could see a tight cluster of bullet holes in the plaster. "Who attacked you, Scully? Padgett was with me in the basement."

"It was the other one, the Brazilian. Naciamento."

"Who's been dead two years?"

"He reached right into me," she said in that terrible dead voice. Then she took in a long, shuddering breath. Mulder wrapped his arms tighter around her. "I don't know exactly what happened," she said, a little firmer, a little closer to her everyday rational self. "I didn't see a weapon, but he could have -- he might have had --"

"It doesn't matter right now," Mulder sighed. "The son of a bitch is gone, that's what matters. And he'd better pray I'm not the one who catches him."

"Mulder, why'd he stop?" Scully asked softly. "Why didn't he kill me?"

Mulder thought about it for a long minute, running a hand down Scully's back in long, soothing strokes. "I don't know," he said at last. "I think maybe we were both right, Scully. Padgett had an accomplice -- one that he imagined, right off the pages of his novel. Maybe destroying the manuscript, the source, cut off the apparition's ability to work in the real world."

"Hmm," Scully murmured, burrowing closer, and Mulder knew that right now she was reacting more to the sound of his voice than the content of his theories. God knows he'd done the same -- how many times had he come to, woozy and confused in a hospital bed, and wanted to weep at the pure, blessed sound of Scully's voice, even if she told him all his life's work was nonsense?

So he kept talking. "Maybe he stopped because I came in -- reading is a fundamentally solitary activity, after all. Even if two people read the same words at the same time, they can interpret them very differently. Maybe that kind of literary projection can't be sustained in two perspectives at once."

His theorizing was interrupted by a loud knock at the door and Skinner's familiar bellow of "Agents!"

Mulder eased himself away from Scully and leaped up to let in the A.D. and his retinue of cops and medics. In one sweeping look, Skinner took in the bullet holes in the ceiling, the surveillance equipment, and the blood on the floor. "What happened here, Agents?"

"Sir, Agent Scully was attacked --"

"I'm fine, sir," Scully said from beside him. Mulder blinked down at her in surprise. She had left the blankets on the couch, and stood with her arms crossed in the enormous sleeves of Mulder's sweatshirt, meeting her superior's eyes with as much calm and authority as she did in her normally immaculate suits. "I was attacked by a man we believe to have been Padgett's accomplice, but thanks to Agent Mulder's timely intervention, I'm not injured."

Skinner held her gaze for a long moment, then glanced at Mulder. Apparently whatever he saw in their faces passed muster. He nodded sharply and motioned to the cops to start packing up the surveillance equipment. "Well, if the accomplice made a break for it, he'll need to find somewhere else to get his orders."

"What do you mean, sir?" Scully asked.

"Did you catch Padgett?" Mulder demanded.

"Sure we caught him. Caught him on the basement floor with his own heart in his hand and no wound on the torso. I've got a neighbor puts you in a confrontation with him, Mulder, I was hoping you could tell me how the hell a man ends up like that."

Mulder shook his head. "I confronted him, but I heard Agent Scully's weapon fire and came back up here to assist her. Last I saw him, he was heartless, but only in the metaphorical sense."

Skinner snorted. "I had a feeling you'd say something like that. We'll run the full forensics battery on him, but I doubt we'll turn anything up."

"Would you need any help with that, sir?" Scully asked.

"Absolutely not," Skinner snapped. "You're under orders to get some rest, Agent." In a lower voice, pitched so the cops wouldn't hear, he added, "and if you disobey those orders, I'll test the blood on the floor and put you on enforced medical leave. It's against Bureau policy to conceal an injury from your superiors, Agent Scully. The only reason I'm letting you get away with it is because I know Agent Mulder would be the first one to report it to me if you were foolish enough to endanger yourself."

"I don't know what you're talking about, sir," Scully said evenly.

"You're white as a sheet, and I know damn well it's not because you were afraid," Skinner growled. He threw one last look around the apartment, nodding as the last of the cops carted out the surveillance computer. "I'll want some sort of a report on this next week, though God knows I won't expect much sense out of it."

"Always good to keep your expectations realistic," Mulder said agreeably.

Skinner gave him what Mulder had started to think of as his friendly goodbye glare and strode off down the hall.

"I think that went well," Mulder said.

Scully raised an eyebrow. "Could have been worse."

"Ain't that the truth." Mulder glanced over at his partner, trying to be unobtrusive and probably failing. She stood ramrod-straight, with her head high; a run-in with the A.D. had done a lot to jolt her back to her upright, determined, unshakeable self. But Skinner had been right, she was awfully pale, her lips bloodless.

Well, it made sense, didn't it? Even if she hadn't lost her heart, she had lost all that blood. "You do look a little ghostly," he told her, smiling to hide his worry. He let his hand run across her back, lightly pressing his lips to the top of her head as he turned back towards the kitchen and went to peer into the fridge. "Do you want anything? Any food? I have, uh… money to order a pizza."

"Fluids, I think," she said shortly. Mulder glanced over to see her leaning on the wall beside the door, one hand to her forehead. She looked up sharply and caught his eye. "I'm fine, Mulder. Just a little light-headed. My blood pressure's probably low, I'm dehydrated."

If she could snap at him with such abject scorn, she couldn't be feeling too awful. He kept a careful eye on her as she made her way back to the couch, but she made it without fainting, though it looked like a near thing. She was breathing hard, too; clearly standing so long had been tougher on her than he'd thought.

At least she seemed content to stay on his couch, where he could take care of her. His fear that she would insist on being taken home slowly evaporated as he watched her curl up in a corner of his couch, pulling the blanket up to her chin and closing her eyes.

Fluids. Right. He brought her a glass of water, watched anxiously as she drained it, then went to refill it. When he came back, she had stretched out flat on her stomach, taking up the whole couch with the blanket twisted around her hips. "Can't have my head elevated," she explained without opening her eyes.

He nodded and settled on the floor with his back to the couch, setting the water on the coffee table. "Still light-headed?"

"A little."

He tipped his head back against the arm of the couch and watched the blanket rise and subside with the gentle, even motion of her breathing. She was so small. It always surprised him; she was such a towering force in his life, her courage and intellect so overwhelming, that he tended to forget how little she was from the outside.

So small, and so fierce: and here she was on his couch, trusting him enough to let him in while she was vulnerable. For a second it was wild, dizzying, more incredible than any story of ghosts or aliens that he'd wanted to believe. That this perfect, brilliant, lion-hearted woman could spend her days with anyone in the world -- and she had chosen him? It beggared belief.

Cautiously, half to reassure himself that she was real, he brushed a strand of hair back from her forehead. "I'm fine, Mulder," she said automatically.

He grinned. "I never doubted it."


End file.
